Baby Jar Christmas Crafts

There are so many good ideas for baby jars.  I think they make fantastic Christmas crafts and very cute gifts. 

Here are my 5 favourites:

1. Glitter 'snowglobes' using old toys as decorations.

2. I-spy jars using old toys and rice.

 3. Sewing jar with pincushion lids. 

4. Individual gift cupcakes. (easy option gift dry cupcake mix).

5. Christmas tree dioramas.

I am going to try out all of these I think.  Now I only need some baby jars....

An honorable mention goes to these Christmas trees that people seem to enjoy making.  Not sure that I am super keen on the finished look, but A+ for effort.

DIY Painting Stained Glass Door - Shortcut Fails

I have an old-ish house with a stained glass front door.  It has been made with some inferior glass I guess.  The little opaque squares seem to be proper stained glass, but the other pieces must have been painted then fired (rather than the colour going all the way through).  They have faded badly.

So faded!

I have been googling all over the place trying to find a glass paint that I could use.  I started out looking at Pebeo's Vitrea 160 range which is down at the local Spotlight store.  However they didn't stock the colours I wanted (only stocking the bright-primary style hues).  I wanted the Tea Green and Crimson. 

I was also dubious about the fact that I wouldn't be able to bake the glass once painted.  I'm going for a quick fix here.  There's no way I'm going to take out each panel, paint and bake and then put pack in.

So I went for the Lefranc & Bourgeois Vitrail range which have slightly different colours but no mention of baking. I chose Olive Green and Violet.

The main thing to remember is that I am painting over colour that is already there.  It has faded in places, but any colour I chose was always going to have a yellow base.  So although I chose a purple, it will mix with the yellow to create a red-brown.  Any green I choose will have extra yellow tones.

However nothing is ever as straight-forward as you'd like.  I washed the glass with spirits as per instructions (normally I never do things properly) but after the initial diligence, I sadly didn't pay attention to something I saw mentioned somewhere about making sure to use a soft sable brush.  I used a chisel bristle brush which meant all the brush strokes showed very clearly.  Not the effect I was after.  So I had to wipe it all off again with turps and start again.

Don't use a hard bristle brush when glass painting.

Now my problem is that I used a very CHEAP sort brush so all the bristles keep coming out.  I have to keep flicking them out, which causes funny patches of either extra colour or too little colour or even worse - I miss them and then the brush hairs stay on the glass.  

When  will I ever learn that taking shortcuts doesn't pay??????

Very nice... but what's that stuck in the glass?

Click here to view finished result.

Preschooler Teepee

This is super clever.  Olivia was going to give it away?! But as it took two intense weekends to make (plus all the materials) she has decided to keep it at her place for small visitors to play with.

This super cute teepee was made by the lovely Olivia.

It was based on a Your Home and Garden pattern, with a few Mocka inspired tweaks in the pattern to make it even better (and work with the fabric widths - 120cm instead of 150cm) .  The dowels have beads and elastic threaded through at the top so the whole thing folds away easily.